


sensation and song

by AllOfThisMatter



Category: Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Attempted Murder, Berlin (City), F/M, Family Member Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Mumbai, Murder, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Patricide, Rating May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-01
Updated: 2015-07-01
Packaged: 2018-04-07 02:07:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4245486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllOfThisMatter/pseuds/AllOfThisMatter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Studies on the sensates through the Avett Brothers' music.<br/>We're starting with Wolfgang.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sensation and song

**Author's Note:**

> 10/10 do recommend listening to the songs that each is about. I am in love with the Avett Brothers and I am in love with Sense8. Please let me know what you think, my loves.  
> This first one's about Wolfie, my sweet little problematic cinnamon bun fave.  
> The song is "In the Curve."

_**I've never taken this curve**_  
_**Drivin' this fast before**_

This time, it’s too much, too fast, all at once. He’s not going to take it anymore. Not going to stand by and let anybody else take it anymore. Heart racing, he pulls as hard as he can until his father stops moving, until the darkness that filled the bastard’s soul fills his eyes instead and Wolfgang knows he’s damned, knows that he's turned out exactly like his old man and he wants to scream. But as he sets fire to the car he thinks of Felix, of his gentle mother, of the little girl down the street whose papa had been killed by their family, of the old man that ran the flower shop without his wife now because the money the Bogdanows had threatened their lives for had been going to pay for her cancer treatment, of so many more innocents and Wolfgang tightens his fists as his heart tightens in his chest. He can feel the heat of the flames on his jacket as he walks away, can feel the bruises his father left on his chest yesterday, can feel his hands pulling, pulling, pulling, stopping the bruises forever and setting himself free.

 _This man will not be the death of me_ , he thinks, _I will choose my own end._

 _ **A glowing stop sign**_  
_**But both lanes are mine**_  
_**No seat belts attached to my door**_

He spends his nights in loud, dark clubs, dancing and drinking and drowning out the anger in his veins with whiskey and one night stands. He fights, he fucks, he forgets, when he can. Some nights Felix encourages him. Other nights he knows when it’s a bad night and he drags Wolfgang home and pushes him into their apartment. He sleeps where he falls, tears streaming down his face, and Felix would move him if he could but waking an inebriated Wolfgang is akin to poking a bear and Felix knows better by now. 

They become thieves, just like he had been destined to become since the Bogdanow name was printed on his birth certificate. Some fates are inescapable, he finds. 

When he was very small he used to respect and admire the law, until he found out that the law in Berlin lined its pockets with mob money and that there were no gods and angels to save them from the devil that lived in his home and shared his name, split his lips, struck his skin. Now he has no love for the law and no heed for their rules and if they catch him or not, it doesn't matter. Prison was made for men like him, with fight in their bones and blood on their hands.

He’s never imagined himself as an old man, doubtful that he’ll make it long enough to be wrinkled and grey. They say that only the good die young, but so do the fearless and the angry. Wolfgang’s both, and he knows that means he’ll die sooner and bloodier. 

He’ll make sure that Felix will, though, that he’s fat and arthritic but happily covered in grandchildren and smiling until the day he dies. Maybe he’ll tell them about Uncle Wolfgang, tell them some lies about his bravery that Felix wholeheartedly believes even though there’s a difference between courage and self-defense, in the same way that a wounded animal striking back is not bold but broken and desperate.

 _ **Well my speed meter don't work**_  
_**So I'm gonna to guess ninety-five**_  
_**Well maybe I'll fix it**_  
_**And maybe I won't**_  
_**It depends on my being alive**_

Nabbing Steiner’s mark is perhaps one of the stupidest fucking decisions of his life, or so Felix mutters while they’re working on the safe. Wolfgang couldn’t care less. Steiner is a man just like his father, like Steiner’s own father, and he deserves to be fucked over. He knows he can crack this safe but there’s all these voices and memories in his head that aren’t his and it’s too loud.

Felix could probably have beaten him senseless than and there, but Wolfgang doesn't care. These singing shows give him clarity, focus. They remind him how and why he’s become the man he is today and maybe it’s stupid but it’s true. Besides, he’s always been a sucker for a sweet voice.

“There’s no shame in drilling,” Felix reminds him quietly.

Wolfgang is many things, monstrous and more, and he has done enough for three lifetimes, but he has never quit on anything and he’s not going to start now, not when it would give the dead smug bastard such satisfaction to see him fail even after he’s gone from this world. The unfamiliar sensations in his head coalesce into something unearthly and he feels as much as hears the tumbler fall into place.

The sound of the diamonds shifting in the pouch as he puts them in their hiding place is music and he can’t stop himself from smiling.

 _ **Well my bottle of bourbon is gone**_  
_**It flew away all by itself**_  
_**So if ever you find it**_  
_**My photo will go behind it**_  
_**In memory of me on your shelf**_

He keeps seeing this woman. He’s never met her before but he feels like he’s known her for centuries. She’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen and he can’t help but imagine tangling his hand in those amazing curls and pressing those lush lips to his, feeling the warmth of her soft skin and the structure of her delicate hands on his cheeks. They have yet to speak to one another but he knows that her name is Kala, hears it in the back of his mind like a song that he doesn’t quite know all the words to but that he desperately he wants to learn.

Wolfgang sees her in his dreams, smiling and laughing as she takes his hand and pulls him through the streets of Mumbai, the smell of jasmine and marigolds drifting from her hair and from the gardens they run through and he wakes saying _my darling _in Hindi even though he’s never been to India, never spoken any language but German or English.__

Glimpses of her on the street are not enough, not enough when he feels as though he’s lived his whole life without breathing and she’s fresh spring air that’s filling his lungs. He’s lived in a dark world all of his days but she’s a sunrise, the impressionistic sort that’s all soft, vital pinks and yellows and oranges and reds and he’s completely _blinded _by her colors but utterly content to be so.__

He’s half-smashed and singing with her this stupid song that seven voices are singing along to in his head and he’s never been happier, never loved a song more in his entire life. He thinks this might be love but he hasn’t much basis for comparison. If someone had asked him to define it at this very moment, Wolfgang would say that it’s watching a movie with Felix, and the seven sets of memories that newly belong to him, and the limitless brown of her eyes, of Kala’s eyes. He wants to say her name every moment of every day but it dies on his lips like he might stain it and so it plays on and on and on in his heart instead.

When he’s swimming one day, he can hear a desperate prayer to Ganesha to save her from her decision, and he’s so startled that he’s yanked from Berlin across the world, where he’s suddenly standing in the middle of a wedding, naked and dripping wet. Adrenaline is coursing through his veins as he tenses to fight whatever is causing her such distress until he freezes at the sight of her in her wedding sari, the sensational red resplendent against her lovely skin. 

When she catches sight of him he can feel her heart stutter and sees her eyes widen with shock and he can barely think straight, let alone speak, but he knows that she doesn’t want this and that she needs his strength to help her stop it. The thought of her unhappy forever is what drags the words from his lips and they’re so weak and pale, but he hopes that she can see what he really wanted to tell her in his eyes.

The connection that she used to summon him breaks as she collapses and as he fades back to Germany he wants to scream in frustration at the loss but soon it’s overwhelmed with worry for her. That night is one of the most sleepless of his life, as he wills her to be well and wonders exactly how he managed before she and the others were in his head because their presence is what finally lulls him to sleep the next night, after she’s woken up.

He thinks, sometime later, that she’s more intoxicating than any drink.

 _ **Well it's been raining all day**_  
_**And it's been raining all night**_

Because his mind’s seven other places in the world, he barely notices when it starts to rain, when his jacket starts pulling at his limbs and water falls aimlessly into his eyes and mouth. It tastes sweeter than the rain in Germany typically does.

Then, he sees her, the rain like diamonds in her curls and the chill causing her to curl into herself, the fine bones of her hand moving around her arms. He almost can’t stop himself from putting his own arms around her, like they’re opposite ends of a magnet or like it’s just… gravity.

The feeling of the cold Berlin rain and the soft Mumbai breeze in conjunction is so dizzying and he knows he’s never felt anything like it in his lifetime and he may not ever again and so he grasps at the moment desperately, hoping to have it to warm his frozen bones when she’s found him out and fear replaces anything at all she might have felt for him.

So fate or fortune or happenstance keep drawing him to her and she keeps talking of incomprehensible miracles when the only miracles he could ever believe in are the curve of her nose, the shell of her ear and the quirk of her lips, the music of her laughter and the slope of her neck. He’s never known such want until he’s mere inches from her lips and all it would take is a small breath to fit them together. And then she’s gone and he’s never felt such emptiness, such bereavement.

 _ **A slip 'n slide highway**_  
_**And I'm moving sideways**_

Wolfgang can barely move from Felix’s bedside. Everything in his world is senseless, and he punishes himself day and night for his brother, for his family spread across the world suffering in so many different ways. He’s in agony but it’s worse than any he’s felt before. 

It’s numbness. It’s silence. 

It’s loneliness.

But when she can be, she sits beside him, quiet and soothing. She holds his hand or strokes his shoulders, and she breathes or hums or prays and he thinks that what she brings him must be peace, whether or not it is through the power of her gods.

_**I'm loose but my steering wheels tight** _

He’s never had easy choices in his lifetime. That’s simply not the hand he’s been dealt. But he’s good at the hard choices and he can make them for his other selves, his better selves. His knuckles tighten on the steering wheel and he smirks before his boot presses the gas. Better to face death smiling than fearful. That way he knows you mean to put up a fight.

The scrape of the copter’s rails against the ambulance roof rips open old scars in his soul but his family is safe for now and that’s all he needs to stitch himself back together.

 _ **Well my '63 Ford is a bull**_  
_**She's four thousand pounds at least**_

Their first kiss is a freight train in the front seat of the car parked outside his uncle’s gate and he can feel it, he can feel how much she’s wanted this, how much she loves him, how much she wants him to just turn away and leave this place.

But he can’t.

And it hurts like losing a limb to pull away from her softness and drive towards his hard reality.

 _ **But metal surrenders**_  
_**When oak trees meet fenders**_

He’s already left a trail of bodies by the time she comes to him again, trapped in a kitchen and moments from death. He had been blocking them out, wanting to spare them the agony of his death while he could, but she broke through. Wolfgang doesn’t want her to see what they do to him, knowing that it will not be clean, but she practically wills him to fighting with her kiss and the weapon she forged in seconds from common kitchen supplies. There’s a swell of admiration in his chest at her intelligence and courage, as well as guilt that she’s using her talents to help him kill people.

In this moment of blood and violence, her eyes flashing and soft mouth sternly set, he has time to think that she could be Kali, reborn on this earth. He has no idea how he knows anything about Kali (a lie to himself; he knows _exactly_ how he knows) but he thinks that Kala ought to be worshipped as her knight, ought to be offered prayers and presents in order to be spared her divine wrath. To her temple, he would crawl on his hands and knees every day to beg her to leave in him in one piece because he knows that the heavens have given her the power to destroy all traces of him in one fell swoop. But he knows that he would always surrender to her, offering himself as sacrifice. 

The next few minutes are a car crash, senseless and bloody.

_**And engines go through the front seat** _

Wolfgang has no hesitation, no fear, not even guilt as he levels the gun with his uncle’s face and unloads the clip. This man is - _was_ \- a murderer of innocents, the very worst kind of strong arm and thug, and he deserves - _deserved_ \- this. For what he’s done to countless people and for what he’s done to Wolfgang himself, what he allowed his father to do him. As a murderer himself, Wolfgang is more than qualified to pass judgement and levy a sentence.

He takes a breath and turns to face her, aware again of her presence. Her eyes search his desperately for something, he knows not what, but she looks terrified. 

For the first time in his life, Wolfgang doesn't want to die a young man. He wants to look in the mirror and see a wrinkled face, grey hair. He wants to hold several babes, with thick black curls and bright blue eyes, or dirty blonde hair and velvetine brown eyes, their pale brown skin a heaven-sent miracle in its own right, and raise them with the woman he loves. He wants to build a home with her, filled with color and laughter and love. He wants to sit in a rocking chair next to Felix while his grandchildren play with their Uncle Fee's. He wants to die peacefully in his sleep in a bed next to his wife. But at the same time, he knows that the things he has done today are what is causing these daydreams to disintegrate before they're anywhere close to reality, and he mourns their loss. 

“And that is why you must marry Rajan,” he says quietly.

The words taste like gunpowder and he finds it hard to swallow but she has to know, she has to have seen now that he’s no good for her and he never will be. He blinks, and she’s gone, and he’s alone with the knowledge that she might never return to him, but it’s for the best, it’s for the best, it’s for the best. 

It has to be.

 _ **Well I lost control in the curve**_  
_**And a gas line broke in the wreck**_

His jagged edges never used to fit together perfectly, but now he can’t even hold them together with his old habits and patterns. He sits by Felix’s bedside. He swims. Otherwise, he’s at his new apartment, alone and stone drunk.

Sometimes the others drift in and out of focus beside him. They rarely speak. Lito rubs his shoulders and makes him take off his jacket, boots, and jeans before he falls asleep. Nomi checks out his security systems, fiddles with his electronics. Riley, often with Will cradled in her lap, sits on his bed next to him and hums songs. Capheus makes him food, watches action flicks on his flat screen. Sun looks out the window for a while, then looks at him, then leaves in silence.

Sometimes he thinks he catches a hint of jasmine in the air. The brush of thick curls on his arm. But then he thinks he must be imagining it because he can never feel her clearly.

Wolfgang can’t tell if he’s just blocking her or if she’s simply not coming to him. He can’t decide which would hurt less.

He’s napping in the chair when Felix wakes. He’s well enough to be moved home in a few weeks, and if he notices any hollowness in his brother’s eyes or words, he doesn’t mention it.

 _ **I walked from the ashes**_  
_**With just a few scratches**_  
_**My crucifix warm on my neck**_

Wolfgang’s stumbling home drunk when he trips into the street and almost gets hit by a truck. Almost.

The next thing he knows, he’s back on the sidewalk and the truck’s horn blares past his ears and her arms are wrapped around him, her head against his heart.

“How… How did you know?” he murmured.

“I didn’t. I just came to talk to you, finally. It must have been the work of the gods and goddesses that I chose this moment. Wolfgang…”

 _Or maybe you are just another of my inescapable fates, my love._

“You make my name sound like music, _liebling._ ”

“Wolfgang…”

“Why are you here?”

“Because I make my own choices, Wolfie. I chose not to marry Rajan for myself, because I do not love him and I will never love him and I don’t want to spend my life like that. I am in your head, Wolfgang. I know every inch of you, past and present. I killed your father and your uncle and your cousin. I cracked that safe. I have seen every side of you, and I will choose you as many times as it takes for you to understand that I love you.”

“Kala, are you sure? That day, your face was so frightened, Kala. So frightened of me. How can you love a man who makes your face so fearful like that?” 

"Wolfgang, I looked so frightened because I was afraid of myself. Because I _wanted_ you to shoot him. Because I thought he deserved it and I have never wished death on another human being in my life until I met all of the _assholes_ -excuse my language- in our family's lives. You, my love, I have never feared and I never will. You are nothing like your father and you may be a monster but you are a good man of a monster in my eyes, Wolfie." 

Tears streaming down his face, he draws in a shuddering breath, and repeats, "Are you _sure_ , Kala?" 

She tilts her face up, eyes finding his immediately, and a slow smile spreads across her beautiful face.

“You make my name sound like music, _mērī jāna._ ”

Whether it is that Christian God, or her Hindu gods and goddesses, or entropy, or gravity, or some supernatural force, or miracles, or fucking fate that brought her to him, he's tired of fighting it. He believes. 

_**Well my good Lord was with me tonight**_  
_**Just ridin' beside me tonight**_  
_**And now we're just talking**_  
_**We're hitch hiking walkin'**_  
_**We'll see you in Concord tonight**_

**Author's Note:**

> Liebe- love
> 
> Mērī jāna- my darling


End file.
